The term frequently kicked around is “hundred-year flood,” but if you can remember more than three such inundations in your own lifetime, that’s probably an inaccurate label to put on what Martineztown went through a couple of weeks ago. It might be more apt to call it a “12-year” flood.

[RE: Letters, “Crap No One Needs,” Aug. 24-30] Mr. Schrader, as you’ve relentlessly pointed out in the Albuquerque press for the last 20-plus years, you don’t pay taxes and encourage the rest of us to live as you do if we protest the war machine. You obviously don’t have the luxury of caring for dependents, for one thing. I applaud you for not supporting the war, but I defy you to prove that you do not ever benefit from the many other tax programs the rest of us fund, including the one used to put a sidewalk under your (bare) protesting feet.

Our Yellow Pages list 553 churches (I counted them). Every one owns a building, be it a sprawling mega-church with a roller park or a plain cinder block chapel, inconspicuous on a residential street. It all adds up to a lot of real estate, and a lot of dry, safe, empty rooms between Sunday school classes.

At the same time, Albuquerque has an estimated 4,000 homeless people, many of them families with children. Shelters won’t let fathers or teenage boys live among women and girls. Consequently, the price of keeping a homeless family together can mean living out of a car, or worse.

Dateline: Austria--A misguided bank robber was arrested after he tried to hold up his local town hall, thinking the historic building was a bank. Wearing a mask and waving a toy pistol, the unemployed man burst into the town hall in the village of Poggersdorf and shouted, “Hold up! Hold up!” The robber realized his mistake when an employee explained to him where he was, police said in a statement. The robber fled into some nearby woods but was arrested when he came back later to pick up his motorbike, which he had left parked outside the town hall.